Posts tagged ‘Ian’s’

It’s freakin’ hot!
Despite the a/c at avec, despite not one but TWO summer showers that day, yesterday’s outdoor temperature of 102 carried over to the kitchen. Service was brutal only because the heat made it so. Ticket flow was fine (though Sylvester was getting a little clobbered by cheese tickets) but Katie and I were just desperate for the night to be over. If the servers wearing sleeveless tops were hot, how do you think three line cooks wearing black pants, chef jackets, and their heads covered were feeling?

My bangs felt like they were plastered to my forehead, and several times I could feel the sweat dripping down behind my ears. Arrrrrghhh, Liz please order us double the amount of short-sleeved dishwasher shirts!! >_<

Still, I'm enjoying the summer. Sweating may not be the most fun activity, but thanks to my first avec summer last year, I've learned to be able to stand the heat.

After work, Katie and I bonded at Dimo's where this week's special was an apple pie pizza. Yum! Katie made a small announcement a couple of weeks ago that she was leaving avec and so every day working with her has been really precious. I'm going to miss my awesome work buddy and line ally! Next week is her last ;_;
Ruth "jokingly" penciled in herself and me into the schedule so that we'd have an all-ladies line for the last time. Hopefully no one (*cough cough* Armanzo) messes with the schedule….

Tomorrow is Saturday soul suck with an extra dose of heat. I say, bring it! After I stop by a store and buy a truckload of Gatorade, that is.

I had a turning-point moment today during my time on Station 2. We went from being relatively quiet to suddenly all these people sitting down and ordering all at the same time. And they mostly wanted stuff from my station and Katie’s. It was all I could do to not scream, “Help! I’m being raped!”
I’m sure a more seasoned pro would have thought nothing of the stream of tickets. But so far I’ve been used to nothing but steady/leisurely services so tonight wasn’t something I’d encountered before. And I got scared. Luckily, Koren was in the window to guide me out of the haze. At the time, though, I thought I was in hell. Later I joked with busser Diego, “I thought I was being punished for all the bad things I’ve done in my life.”
I made it though! Koren was proud of me, though she chided me for my self-deprecating attitude. I’ve also learned it’s okay to throw jobs at people when you’re in the weeds and they’ve got nothing to do. Though at the time my brain was a little too fried to realize this. Sylvester did help me cook off some mackerel, so thank you!

Also of note, I think I sold a record low of 13 focaccia tonight. Yeah!… Waitaminnit…

After work Katie and I headed to Ian’s (even though they call themselves Dimo’s I can’t do it yet) for bonding over pizza. Yay!

Katie says she’ll be seeing some Station 3 training soon. Woot!

What was especially nice about this bonding time was that it was right on the heels of bonding time from the night before. Elliot had worked 3 with Theo, Katie worked 1. And after work we sat around with Liz, who barbacked that night, and talked while drinking rosé.
Yep, that’s Elliot drinking rosé out of a pint container. Like a boss.

Sadly, Elliot’s decided to move his last day up (I’m still kind of upset about it) so Monday night was essentially Katie’s last night working with Elliot. So I coerced him into hanging out with us for a little while. And Elliot’s so nice, he agreed (though for a second I was worried he’d just bike home and not say anything >_>;;). Theo tagged along with us. We decided on breakfast at a diner in his neighborhood called the Golden Apple.

I loved bonding! I can’t say much for the food though. While my pancakes were fine, my eggs and sausage were kind of sad. Elliot had a Reuben sandwich: “On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this a 2.” Theo had a gyro omelette… I don’t even want to know whether any good came of that. Katie had a combo breakfast plate and maybe she got the best of the bunch?

Siiiiiigh, will I never have awesome bonding time like this ever again?

I ended up not doing any training on Station 2 Tuesday. Either Elliot told Koren I was a spectacular failure, or maybe it was because we got a little busy right off the bat for me to get another try on that station.

Either way, I was a little relieved and disappointed.

It was a steady stream of orders that kept us busy until about 10:30, and then it suddenly died and got quiet. What a difference… you’d think we’d be mellow on a Tuesday but at one point I had three cheese plates, a salumi plate (or two), and some foie going on. It kinda sucked at the time. (Elliot: “All I want to do is drink my Gatorade and enjoy my fun-size Snickers. Is that too much to ask?”) I ended up selling out all my whole fish (granted, I only had 5 all day), and by the end of the night, I had one order of whitefish left. Phew!

After work Katie and I went to Ian’s to have after-work pizza, which I think is the best time to have that pizza. We brought some dates, hoping our regular pizza would be there. Ian’s somehow renamed itself into Dimo’s, but the pizza and the staff (we finally found out the guy’s name is Jason) are the same, so I’ll probably still be calling it Ian’s out of habit.
(For the record, I had the corndog pizza and the steak & fries pizza. Random and delicious! Katie had buffalo chicken and… I’ve forgotten her other slice of pizza, but oh well, it was tasty.)

I open on Thursday.
Hopefully I’m not confronted with that horrible wallpaper on the office computer that’s essentially a tiled picture of Blackbird’s pastry chef Bryce Caron with an awful haircut and trying to pose all avant-garde. He looks like a goth Geico caveman. It’s terrible. Why he cut his hair, I’ve no idea, but it looked better when it was longer and he tied it back, as opposed the current pigeon’s nest he’s sporting on his head.
I guess one good thing came out of it. Elliot sent a picture of it to Armanzo who got a good laugh out of it.

I got a case of the Mondays tonight and my morale especially took a nosedive when I walked up to station 3 and was confronted with this:

Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash because that would’ve been the norm. But last week, through some mixed blessing, we got the stove all fixed up and lawd almighty, there were ALL SIX pilot lights working.
All the line cooks who ever worked 3 with a grill light were thrilled. It was a miracle!

But then today happened, and at first I thought, “Oh the pilot lights got blown out,” but when I went to relight them, they wouldn’t take the flame. WHYYYYYYY?!
Wahhhh >_< Back down to earth with a ka-thunk. I should've known that it was too good to last, and was a cruel joke played by the Kitchen Gods.

Speaking of cruel joke, Katie and I were looking forward to going to Ian's, and astonishingly, even Elliot agreed to come, but when we got there, Ian's had closed. WHYYYYYY?! They let us get pizza to go, but IT'S NOT THE SAME DAMMIT. Urghhh I hope Elliot comes with us again when we can actually go in and sit down. Did I miss out on my bonding time forever? ;_;

I open tomorrow. Hopefully things look up. Not that Monday was terrible, but I would really like the burners to miraculously light up again, and I want another opportunity to bond with my sous chef and my fave sister line cook together.

I worked station 3 tonight. It was really weird to be scheduled for 5pm, but hey, I’m not complaining. I mean, aside from my finding out that we were out of cheddar for the cheese plate. And that I didn’t have much in the way of salumi and ended up needing to slice more during service… but again. Not complaining. (And no one ordered foie tonight. Definitely happy about that!)

After work, Katie asked me if I wanted to go to Ian’s, to which I said, “Hell yes!”

Ian’s is this awesome pizza place Katie took me to one night after we didn’t feel like parting ways yet when she dropped me off at the train station. I’m sure they sell “normal” pizza when I’m not around, like plain ole cheese and sausage and stuff, but when she took me there, they had pizza with toppings like “lasagna”, “philly cheese steak”, and “cheese tortellini”. How can you NOT like a place like this?!

I had the chicken fried steak and chicken parmesan. Katie had the mac ‘n’ cheese and barbecue chicken. We split each of them and shared.

Of course, we didn’t just go to Ian’s to snack on pizza. We talked about work and shared our work stories. Katie’s definitely hands-down one of my favorite co-workers. Since she’s still a fledgling line cook, I definitely try to talk with her and see how she’s doing, or answer her questions as best I can, and coach her with what little experience I’ve earned. Or we commiserate about what we don’t like, or who we don’t like, or the night in general. Ahhh, super fun times to really connect with somebody! And it always feels like it’s never long enough!

I definitely look forward to bonding with Katie again.

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Oh, also found out from Katie that people really liked the antipasto I made! YEAH! *fist pump*
Unfortunately, when I came into work today, I saw that someone had cooked farro and broccoli and added it to my antipasto, so it it looked like Franken-pasto =_= Geez, original much?
Now I’m even more determined to make another tasty antipasto the next time I open!

Katie also told me that Koren said some good words about my push last week with the shoulders and squid. Aww, yay! *^_^*